Rebecca Hicke


2025

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A City of Millions: Mapping Literary Social Networks At Scale
Sil Hamilton | Rebecca Hicke | David Mimno | Matthew Wilkens
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities

We release 70,509 high-quality social networks extracted from multilingual fiction and nonfiction narratives. We additionally provide metadata for ~30,000 of these texts (73% nonfiction and 27% fiction) written between 1800 and 1999 in 58 languages. This dataset provides information on historical social worlds at an unprecedented scale, including data for 2,510,021 individuals in 2,805,482 pair-wise relationships annotated for affinity and relationship type. We achieve this scale by automating previously manual methods of extracting social networks; specifically, we adapt an existing annotation task as a language model prompt, ensuring consistency at scale with the use of structured output. This dataset serves as a unique resource for humanities and social science research by providing data on cognitive models of social realities.

2024

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[Lions: 1] and [Tigers: 2] and [Bears: 3], Oh My! Literary Coreference Annotation with LLMs
Rebecca Hicke | David Mimno
Proceedings of the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2024)

Coreference annotation and resolution is a vital component of computational literary studies. However, it has previously been difficult to build high quality systems for fiction. Coreference requires complicated structured outputs, and literary text involves subtle inferences and highly varied language. New language-model-based seq2seq systems present the opportunity to solve both these problems by learning to directly generate a copy of an input sentence with markdown-like annotations. We create, evaluate, and release several trained models for coreference, as well as a workflow for training new models.